This article provides some examples of features and mechanisms needed in the Linux kernel for server nodes operating in mission-critical environments, such as telecom, where reliability, performance, availability and security are extremely important. Here, we discuss four such features: a cluster communication protocol, support for multiple-FIB, a module to verify digital signatures of binaries at run time and an efficient low-level asynchronous event mechanism. For some of these example features, open-source projects already exist to provide their implementations. For other features, there currently is no open-source project that can implement them. For each of our four examples features, we discuss the feature, its importance, the advantages it provides, its implementation when available and the status of its integration with the Linux kernel.

By Ibrahim Haddad at Linux Journal.

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